


The Same River Twice

by wanda von dunayev (wandavon)



Category: Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Community: skyrimkinkmeme, Dragon & Human Interactions, Fluff and Angst, Grief/Mourning, Language Differences, Loneliness, No Sex, Old Age, Other, Platonic Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-11
Updated: 2020-12-11
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:08:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,208
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28002174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wandavon/pseuds/wanda%20von%20dunayev
Summary: “I know you,” Dengeir said. “I—I think we’ve met before.” His voice quavered badly, so low and thready he could barely hear himself. Probably for the best. He’d cracked up. He was talking to a godsdamned dragon.The dragon’s head snapped towards him, snake-quick, and Dengeir shrank into the trees. Worthless. The wood would catch like kindling, and he would blaze alive with it.“Our paths have crossed, joor.” The dragon lifted its chin, its long neck straightening so that it towered above him. If he didn’t know better, he’d have thought it was with pride. “I am called Felkulzii.”Nobody will talk to Dengeir anymore except for this mighty, ageless, inscrutable creature who appears unannounced and leaves him odd gifts.
Relationships: Dengeir of Stuhn/Dragon
Comments: 15
Kudos: 21





	The Same River Twice

**Author's Note:**

> Someone on the kinkmeme posted a ridiculously adorable prompt about dragons having a thing for old men, and I immediately thought of my favourite old man, Dengeir of Stuhn. Of course, they wanted something light and funny, and I’m a wreck so I wrote this instead.

There wasn’t much to do around town—he’d fought with Tekla, and Thadgeir was playing the annoying baby brother and giving him the silent treatment until he apologised—so Dengeir packed a sack of food and water, an axe, and a bedroll and trekked up into the hills.

The trail was rough, and unseen footsteps shook the carpet of wild garlic and campion and horseweed. The whole jaunt was an unnecessary risk, foolish to take. There were ever Imperial spies tracking him. Without Lod by his side, without martial skill or the strength to swing a sword, he was vulnerable. A sad old man who’d once worn a crown.

Dengeir went anyway. The alternative of sitting in Falkreath, thinking about Siddgeir prancing around in the longhouse, seeing the same dozen people giving him the same pitying looks, was unbearable. It was always better to be outside. Things were clearer in clear air.

The western mountains smoked with the coming dawn, spectral lines of cloud that must have been two leagues long among the heights, lit pink from below. In the murky grey morning the shadows stretched without end, and his own shadow spread before him as if cast by a giant.

As the ground roughened and Dengeir started to pick his way up into the foothills of the Jeralls, he slowed his pace. He’d nothing to get back to, no real duties, no social engagements. Since he’d stepped down as Jarl the hold had withdrawn from him, the circles he’d once been part of snapping closed. He, now, on the outside looking in.

Instead he looked around him at the forest, the stands of pines gradually taking shape as the sun rose, the mountains appearing firmer, more regular, only the highest clouds remaining. A shadow darted over him with a bird’s quickness, and he glanced up.

He’d loved birds as a lad: chickadees and wrens and even, once or twice, a golden eagle that came in from the west, coasting low over the cap of mountains that formed where the Jeralls met the Druadachs and divided Falkreath from the Reach. Dengeir had felt elevated seeing it, exalted. He’d imagined flying, the intensity of the wind against his face and arms.

The shadow passed over him again. Larger this time. As his mind struggled to square that, something far off screamed.

Dengeir froze in place. A prey instinct. But even as he told his legs to move, they disobeyed.

Something glittering and white like snow passed in his peripheral vision, going faster than any eagle he had seen. The shadow it cast was huge, easily the size of the Jarl’s longhouse, and its wings beat gusts of dirt and branches into the air, shook the trees, made little eddies of dust whirl around his feat.

It alit on the ground less than fifty paces from him. Its scales were mirror-bright, and the red of dawn made it look bloody. Another’s blood, of course. Did dragons even bleed?

An insane thought, a child’s thought. The word echoed in his head. He watched it, riveted, trembling. A dragon.

The dragon unfurled its wings. Closer now he could see that it was neither grey nor white but both, the colour shifting each way it turned and all of it glimmering like silver set with diamonds. As it twisted the dawn light caught the scales, softened the crimson to a rose-gold.

He stood rooted in place. A nightmare, but a nightmare more beautiful than any he’d imagined in the cramped corners of his life. The spikes of its teeth, the barbs that rose on its back, the rows of cruelly ridged scales about its face had a strange perfection.

 _There is no more honourable death._ He tensed himself, waiting for the plume of fire that would burn him alive. It would hurt briefly, terribly. Then he would be on to Sovngarde. He felt no fear, only a sort of tearing sadness that made his eyes sting. He had always known he would die like this: completely alone.

The dragon stood there, its head tilting back and forth on the long neck. Turning so that first one eye, then the other were fixed on him. The massive jaws snapped twice.

As he watched it straightened and drew back, and then made a hissing noise. It sounded as if it were speaking. He couldn’t guess what it said. His knees no longer seemed to want to obey him. He sank down, thinking, _Kneeling is no way to die,_ and, _Better for it to be done quickly._

The dragon reared back. The long neck curled upwards like a plume of smoke. Then, with a flex of its legs, it leapt and rose with strangely graceless motions, as if the weight of its body were too great even for its massive wings.

He watched it go. Its wings churned the mist, catching scraps of cloud, the muscles in its shoulders working as it moved higher. It rose over the hills to the west, dropping between the peaks like a loosed bolt, a long and elegant point. Then it was gone.

* * *

“You know much dragon lore?” Dengeir asked Thadgeir that night.

He’d apologized to Tekla, and all three of them were talking again. Funny how a brush with death did that.

He’d been early returning to town, which had drawn a few of Thadgeir’s sideways looks but no comment. That was for the best, Dengeir thought. He wasn’t sure what he’d have said, how he’d have described the strange meeting and the dragon’s lack of aggression, and he didn’t much relish looking a fool.

“No more than anyone else.” Thadgeir was engrossed in using his bread to mop up the juice from the lamb Tekla had made. “I hope to never learn of them up close. Beasts of smoke and fire, driven by their hunger. They’d rage through us all like flame through linen.”

Dengeir made a noncommittal noise and took a mouthful of mead. The dragon on the hill had certainly been of something more than mortal flesh, but it had been of wind and snow and clean air, glittering like the far peaks of the Druadachs. And while its look had been intent, burning with intelligence, it had not struck him as violent.

 _Dumb old fool. What do you know of a dragon’s looks?_ It probably thought he was too tough and sinewy to make for good eating.

Tekla worked in the hall beyond where they sat, her hands flying in his peripheral vision. When he turned to glance at her she was folding the bedclothes, and she flashed him a smile. She was always so present, such a help, and he’d be lost without her. She must long to be elsewhere. It made guilt and shame eat through his belly. A girl stuck serving two old men, of course she wanted a better life. _And that fool Siddgeir will promise it, even if he won’t deliver._

Thadgeir must have caught his glance because when Dengeir looked back, his brother narrowed his eyes in warning. That made Dengeir more inclined to cause a scene. Being an elder was like being a child again, he thought, except that no one thought you were adorable. No one found your antics endearing.

But Thadgeir just took another heel of bread and wiped his plate again. “You’re not still thinking of going to Helgen, I trust.”

He’d been thinking of the silver-diamond dragon, but now that Thadgeir mentioned it he thought of Helgen. It was hard to look outside at Falkreath, barely visible through the shifting wall of rain, they so safe in their dim, cozy house, and think of it. In his mind he saw Helgen whole, entire, a little town he’d travelled through dozens of times. The people stopping by to wave to their Jarl, dropping in with bags of grain, buckets of cloudberries, the best of their pelts.

Levelled, now. He’d seen what fire did. The walls fallen in, probably, the timber like blackened matchsticks. He’d seen what it did to people, too. All of the people who’d smiled and waved and brought him gifts, burnt into postures of terror.

“Of course I’m still thinking of going.” The image should have made him queasy, but he took another mouthful of young carrots. “I just need to figure out how to get there. Don’t want anyone getting the wrong idea.”

“I’m not sure what the right idea is,” Thadgeir said. “It’ll just upset you, Den.”

He spoke so casually, so kindly. As always the care and concern behind the words struck Dengeir like a sock in the mouth. Thadgeir just went around, calm as you please, tending to his little patch of the world, loving Falkreath. Loving him. And Dengeir was hard and dry and bitter and could no more accept it than a rind of dried fat could accept blood.

Orna had loved them as well. Ever the peacemaker, their baby sister. If she were alive none of this would be happening. She’d have kept her brat Siddgeir in line. She’d have talked to Tekla. She’d have talked to him, too.

“It should upset me,” he said. “It should upset all of us. Nine Gods, they’re our folks. It’s our duty.”

Thadgeir went on chewing his bread and snuck a look at him. But at least he didn’t say the obvious thing. _It’s not our duty. It’s Jarl Siddgeir’s duty._ That spared Dengeir the trouble of having to say that Siddgeir was an incompetent child whose mind was filled with nothing loftier than drinking, hunting, and bedding maids.

“If you insist on going, I’m going too,” Thadgeir said at last. “But I want you to know, I think you’re making a mistake.”

“Wouldn’t be the first,” Dengeir said. Thadgeir snorted, and when he glanced over at Tekla, still folding clothes, she was grinning. _Won’t be the last, either._ “Let’s plan to go before the month is out, then. Want to get there before the weather turns.”

* * *

Dengeir went back to the trail later in the week, telling himself that it was wise to get out while the fall was still young. Stupid—he had been spared, inexplicably, once. He was pushing his luck.

But the memory of the dragon pulled at him. He woke in the night and seemed to see the imprint of its wings on the walls, radiant as if they burned with their own fire.

He’d inhabited such a small and constricted space, he saw that now. For all his title, his responsibilities when he’d been Jarl, he had seen little of the world. Tax complaints, disputes over farms, a horse getting a donkey in the family way. That was what Dengeir had spent the days and hours and minutes of his life on.

He didn’t regret it. He’d wanted to be a good Jarl. It was his duty to see to his hold’s small matters with the same seriousness Igmund showed the Reach’s silver trade, or Balgruuf showed the wheat farms that fed all of Skyrim. The matters were small to him, but to his people they might be the entire breadth and depths of their lives. They might be life and death itself.

But the dragon was a glimpse of another world, a more rarefied plane filled with heroes, stories, songs. _Like something from a legend._ It _was_ from a legend. It was a legend given physical form.

The rock the dragon had stood on was abandoned now. But as Dengeir approached he caught the glimpse of something glimmering on the ground.

At first he thought it was a piece of glass reflecting the sky, pink and wet-looking. He hovered beneath the sparse cover of pine boughs. The day was cloudless, and he saw no sign of movement. Nothing to say a dragon was near. But the rock stood open and exposed, and he did not know how far dragons could see, or how fast they could travel. Far, he assumed. Fast.

Dengeir felt that he waited a long time. Wind made the grasses that had grown in the rock’s cracks whisper, and he saw himself, a dishevelled old man skulking in the forest’s shadows like a schoolboy awaiting his scolding, eyes darting nervously up and down. No wonder they hadn’t wanted him to stay Jarl. He was lucky they hadn’t forced him to become Siddgeir’s jester.

He made himself walk out, though he still crouched low and kept glancing upwards. Out under the open sky he felt very small, and now he saw himself through the eyes of a dragon, a circling predator overhead, looking down at a small, unarmored lump of flesh. _A crumb of sweetroll on a big, high platter._

He scrambled up the rock as quickly as he could. The incline was steeper than it had looked from among the trees, and he wasn’t as limber as he’d been, but he was still not totally incapacitated and fear made him fleet. The gleaming thing lay closer, and now he saw that it was almost perfectly round and flat.

It wasn’t glass, he knew at even three steps away. It was a shell the size of a dinner plate. When he turned it over in his hands the underside of it reflected briefly, fiercely, the sun, before it resolved into iridescence. Ridged, lightly-veined, and breathtaking. Mother of pearl.

He ran a finger over the edge, struck both by its beauty and by the strangeness of finding it here. Nestled in the arms of the Jeralls, facing north across leagues of forest and swamp and stone, farmlands and cities. The creature had brought the sea with it. It had brought the sea to Dengeir.

 _Brought it to you? It’s a damn dragon._ No doubt it had taken the shell for its own purposes. He remembered Thadgeir’s words about dragons and their greed, their hunger for all the world.

Such a strange thing to take, though, the shell. With such little meaning or worth, aside from its beauty.

* * *

The next two times he returned there were other things there, sitting on the rock:

A square of gleaming bronze roof or panelling, he could not tell which. When he picked it up it was warm to the touch, radiating heat from the sun’s warmth. One of the dying days of summer, Dengeir thought. He thought about taking the panel with him as if he could use it to ward off fall’s chill, but decided not to. He didn’t want to risk drawing the dragon closer to town.

A juniper branch, not a twig but four feet of warped wood. It would have taken three strong men to twist it free. Dengeir couldn’t lift it, but he bent his head, ignoring the creak of his knees. It smelled sharply medicinal and seemed to drive all the confusion and self-pity from his head.

A long, heavy platinum chain that at first he thought had come from a ship, save that it shone too brightly for anything that had been underwater, and the metal was too magnificent for such use. When he came closer he saw that every few links the surface had been covered in semi-precious stones—jade, lapis, turquoise. He could not understand it at all. Like the juniper branch, he could not lift it.

A bracelet, this one more clearly meant for human use, of a gold so pure that when he pressed hard it dented, etched in patterns that showed stars, meandering rivers, and strange horses with high-humped backs. That, too, he considered taking, intending to ask Thadgeir of the animals it showed. He could see less reason for a dragon to need a bracelet, though he did not know how he would explain its origin. This, too, he left.

* * *

When he returned to the rock next, there were no little surprises on it.

There was one surprise, and it was enormous. The silver-diamond dragon.

It had come in low from the south, and this time it moved so silently he did not realise it was near until its shadow crossed him, a long strange shape in the setting sun. Gliding as if it planned to surprise him. As if it did not want to startle him.

 _All the better to eat me._ As before the sensation seemed to leave his body. He stood there, at the base of the rock, looking up—up, up, up, able to see, now, the way the dragon’s scales slid over each other like a snake’s, flexing though they must have been strong as the diamonds they so resembled.

The dragon shifted its weight and leaned forwards so its neck curved over the rock. Very close; if he’d thrown a stone he could have struck it. He could see the strange hatching of red around its iris, as if it, too, were scaled, the black sclerae of its eyes. Its pupil widened, narrowed.

Then it spoke, definitely and unmistakably this time. ‘Grind proosa’ it sounded like; Dengeir could not have guessed what it meant. It _was_ speaking, though, and not the sort of speaking that sent gouts of flame across his face.

It moved its head with that strange predatory quickness again, watching him from each eye. Of course he had no idea what it was thinking. But it had spoken, and he had lived. Underneath the numbness of his fear, he felt a sort of strange exaltation that sent tremors through him. He had heard the speech of a dragon.

Long moments passed. The dragon simply looked at him. He struggled to find his own words, to even catch his breath.

“I know you,” Dengeir said. “I—I think we’ve met before.” His voice quavered badly, so low and thready he could barely hear himself. Probably for the best. He’d cracked up. He was talking to a godsdamned dragon.

The dragon’s head snapped towards him, snake-quick, and Dengeir shrank into the trees. Worthless. The wood would catch like kindling, and he would blaze alive with it. 

“Our paths have crossed, joor.” The dragon lifted its chin, its long neck straightening so that it towered above him. If he didn’t know better, he’d have thought it was with pride. “I am called Felkulzii."

Standing there in the brilliant pale light of autumn, surrounded by falling leaves and the rustle of small creatures, the slow seep of cold starting in his boots, Dengeir stared up at the dragon. The dragon was talking to him.

“Dengeir of Stuhn,” he said. It seemed absurd, somehow, making polite overtures to a dragon. But the dragon had manners if nothing else. He reflected that maybe Siddgeir could learn a thing or two from it, but that was so silly, so absurd he had to quash the thought, lest he start laughing until he screamed. “I—I was the Jarl of Falkreath.”

Was. _What kind of a stupid comment is that?_ He’d been young once as well, was he going to brag about that? _Was the Jarl. Back didn’t hurt. Had all my hair._ He was talking to a fucking dragon. The dragon did not care. What did dragons care about, exactly? Sending people screaming to their graves?

“Falkreath.” The dragon—Felkulzii? Should he use the dragon’s name?—exhaled the word. At first Dengeir thought that smoke streamed from its nose, but then he realised it was just the dragon’s breath, misting in the cold autumn chill as his own did. “It is an old name. _Wuth_. The weight of ages is on it.”

They were making small talk about his hold. That was really the peak, Dengeir thought. A little knot of hysteria was unravelling in his chest, and he felt it rising into the base of his throat, his neck. When it reached his mouth he would scream or babble or gibber, and then he would not stop. He would be the mad old fool they all thought in truth.

The dragon was still moving its head back and forth, looking at him through each strange red-and-black eye. “I have slept under the”—an unintelligible, unknown word, here—“for aeons beyond count.”

 _I’ll bet you did._ “Is it—near here?” Dengeir managed. He wondered how many other dragon barrows lay nearby, untended, grown over. How many others would emerge from the earth to torch their villages and lay waste to the land? This one, at least, did not seem hostile. But he did not know. He recalled Thadgeir’s warning. Their duplicity. Their greed.

“No. It lies far to the north, where the snow sits deep on the face of the”—completely unintelligible—“mountain.”

Winterhold, then, most like. His relief was immense, but it brought with it a crushing weight of guilt and sadness, too. Shame at his smallness. The people of Winterhold were no less people than those of Falkreath, and he and Korir had crossed paths a time or two. _He’s a decent man. He has a wife, a child._ His death, the deaths of his folk, would be no less tragic than the deaths of Dengeir’s.

"Ofan het,” the dragon said. “You did not take all the items I have left.”

“The things on yonder rock?” The remark surprised him, and he let it show. “I didn’t know they were mine to take. Wouldn’t be right to just—to help myself to your things.”

The dragon made a low, soft hissing noise, and Dengeir flinched, but it made no move towards him. “They are nothing to me. I have brought them for you to enjoy.”

This was such a strange comment that he simply stared, dumbfounded, perplexed, wondering if there were some linguistic difficulty between them that made him miss the nuances of the language.

He’d read of the ancient legends, that men had worshipped dragons as gods, and the dragons had accepted their worship as their due. Was the dragon trying to lure him to some sort of cult? That seemed remarkably inefficient. Then he wondered if the dragon were trying to tame him, as he’d have brought pleasant treats to tame a dog. _Wouldn’t be much of a dog. An old cur, probably mangy._

Slowly the tension was leaving him, and it left his entire body sore, aching as if he’d been beaten. The fear was still there, but dimmer now; he could bat it aside. His confusion was dominant. He had no real idea what was happening. He wondered if he were dreaming, having some senile episode.

He wanted to sit down, but the ground was frozen mud. He didn’t want to make the walk back to Falkreath wet and filthy. If he could make the walk back to Falkreath. If the dragon didn’t eat him alive.

The dragon lifted its head once more, showing the long, cold line of its throat as it tilted its head to the sky. “The time draws on,” he said. “You must return to your”—again, another word Dengeir could not understand. “The path will be too treacherous in the dark, and you will be hurt. Ahraan.”

Dengeir looked up and saw that it was indeed growing late, paling near the horizon with the colours of fall sunset, already dark high up where the first stars shone. The wind was light, but it had a bite to it that went through his clothes and made him shiver. He stamped his feet.

“I can’t lift the branch or the”—he wondered what to call the strange metal length—“the big chain. But I didn’t mean to refuse your gifts. I’ll take the panel and the bracelet with me.”

“Ah, I was not thinking of your smallness, Dengeir of Stuhn. Of course.” Dengeir moved towards the rock, but the dragon said, “No, do not climb. I will drop them to you.”

 _Drop them_ , the dragon said. He had no hands, though. But as Dengeir stood watching, wondering, the dragon took up the bracelet and the panel between its jaws. They could have torn the head off an aurochs. But he held them gingerly, and when he’d let them fall in the dirt and Dengeir picked them up, he could see that the dragon had carried them so lightly even the soft, soft gold was not scratched.

“My thanks.” Dengeir looked at both, the panel and the bracelet. “They’re more than pretty. They’re wondrous and strange.”

“Your amusement is my thanks,” the dragon said. Another odd statement. “I hope you will be _aar_.”

Dengeir had no idea what ‘aar’ was, but he was reasonably sure that if the dragon wanted it, he didn’t. Still, he tucked the bracelet into one of the pouches he wore at his waist. The panel was too large, though holding it he was surprised at its lightness. It seemed as if he could bend it, too, and it would not break. “Dwemer, I take it. From the Reach?”

“No. A place far, far further.”

Dengeir studied it, the way the flawless light of late afternoon made it seem almost to burn, and he thought that it had lain in some strange land for decades and centuries and millennia beyond count, buried in snow or sand, watching entire civilizations rise and fall and disappear into ruins.

The years were too great. It was meaningless. But to the dragon before him, it would be real. He’d have slumbered through it, as Dengeir slumbered through a long, slow Sunday.

“I will return here,” the dragon said.

He was definitely being tamed—maybe the dragons were just inventing human husbandry now. But being tamed by a dragon would be the most exciting thing that had happened to him in his sixty-eight years, so he thought he might go along with it.

“I’m sure our paths will cross again, then,” Dengeir said. He was careful, all the same, not to show the dragon his back.

Only as he was walking back to Falkreath, dazed and dreaming, did he realize that he was no longer thinking of the dragon as an ‘it’.

* * *

He came back often after that, as often as he could tear himself away from Falkreath town. Sometimes there were more gifts there, fascinating odds and ends, occasionally things Dengeir thought were just junk. But he liked those too. They were signs, he thought, little hints of what to a dragon’s mind was interesting. A piece of sea-glass, worn soft and smooth; a weathered boot, beaten down by rain and mud; a rusted, twisted horseshoe.

Fall had crept on now, turning the sky more often to a dim grey sheet, and the threat of blizzards was always in the air. At the best of times he’d found the winters long, wearing, wet—in storms the roads vanished, and everything became a dull wall of white without seam.

Now he fairly chafed at his confinement, wanted to be out in the hills, away from the looks and sneers, smelling the winter scent of pine and snow. Talking to Felkulzii.

One evening—or late afternoon, really, because the days were getting shorter and shorter, even with midwinter still a way’s off—he came back to find Thadgeir already tending the hearth, the house full of warmth and firelight.

Dengeir shucked off his snowy, muddy boots and his pack and collapsed into one of the armchairs with a sigh. The fire’s heat buffeted his skin and left it raw, made his eyes water, but after the trail its warmth was welcome. He felt his joints beginning to ease and unlock, some of the cold tight pain finally ebbing.

“Been going out a lot, lately,” Thadgeir said. When Dengeir glanced over, he wasn’t smiling, but his eyes crinkled at the corners. “You got a woman we should know about, Den?”

“Bah,” Dengeir said. His face went red hot from more than the fireplace. Thadgeir’s teasing had always been particularly annoying, gifted, as he was, with a little brother’s insight into the most sensitive and embarrassing topics.“Half the women in this town are Siddgeir’s. Not you, Tekla,” he added, noticing her as she set the table for dinner. She rewarded him with a grin.

Thadgeir snorted and didn’t take the bait. “Well, whoever she is, she’s doing you wonders. Tell her to keep at it.”

“Bah!” Dengeir said again. But he was not displeased. He _had_ felt more cheerful lately. Everything had been imbued with a sort of magic and wonder, giving it the glimmering shine of pictures in a children’s fairy-story.

Of course it had. He was practically _in_ a fairy-story. He was friends with a dragon.

Dengeir was doing his best to be kind these days, conscious of the fragile calm that had fallen over the house. His good mood made it easier. Granted, he still kept an eye on Tekla, and was careful of what he said or passed to her; he did not, fully, believe that she could be trusted. But it was easier to say nothing, easier to be polite. Better, too, he thought.

And he hated fighting with Thadgeir. With Orna dead and Siddgeir acting the cretinous lad, Thadgeir was all the family he had.

Neither he nor Thadgeir had mentioned Helgen in a while. No doubt Thadgeir was hoping that if he never brought it up, Dengeir would forget, like a senile, easily-distracted old man. _Not damn likely._ Well, if Thadgeir wanted to think of him as doddering and witless, that would be his trouble.

But Dengeir was no longer so keen on going either. It wasn’t that his feelings had changed—that it was their duty to see what had happened, to witness the ruin of their hold and the suffering of their people—because they had not. He considered it, still, a necessity.

It was just that he was afraid, now, that it would change his friendship with Felkulzii, to see what he and his kind were capable of. What they did to Dengeir’s kind without a single thought, as easily as he’d have trod on bugs.

“You _have_ been going out a lot,” Thadgeir said again. “Everything alright?”

For a single furious moment Dengeir glared at him, wondering if this was it, if he were to truly lose or be betrayed by everyone. Sniffing for information, his own little brother. The goddamned traitor.

But Thadgeir returned his look levelly. The moment passed. Siddgeir scorned and ignored Thadgeir, too. He had to—needed to—be able to trust Thadgeir. If Dengeir couldn’t, then there was nothing left at all.

“Just walking,” he said. He tried to sound casual and just sounded like a man trying to hide something. _Well, I am, I suppose._ “Same trail and everything. Check my bootprints if you don’t believe me.”

“Keep your secrets, then, old man.” Thadgeir rose from his crouch on the ground. Dengeir expected that he would head into the dining room for dinner. Instead he stepped towards the sideboard at the back of the room. “Stay there,” he said over his shoulder. “I got something for you. If you’re going to wander up and down the mountains, you better be ready for it.”

“A gift? It’s not my birthday, is it? I’m not that old yet.”

Thadgeir laughed. “No. Just a little thank you. For taking it easy now and then.” He turned, carrying a large, flat box in his arms. “And your cloak is a mess. You look like you walked here from Riften and snagged every branch on the way. There’s barely any fabric left of it for Tekla to mend.”

Dengeir harrumphed, but when Thadgeir set the package down he opened it regardless. Inside was a cloak, brown-black, the colour of a winter forest. The clasp was a horn button, the back simple wool, which he approved, hating needless trumpery. But the lining was shirred beaver, so dense and soft he felt he could lose his fingers in the nap.

Dengeir frowned at that, stroking it, feeling guilty. “Thadgeir, this is too expensive. You’re tossing good coin out.”

“Hardly expensive,” he said. “I caught the beavers myself. It was just a matter of having Lod stitch the thing together.”

He could have sold the pelts for a pretty penny, all of that said—beaver was a princely pelt, warmer than near anything except for bear, and far softer. As Dengeir studied it, still stroking the inside like it was a living pet, Thadgeir leaned against the back of the chair, keeping it between them as if to ward Dengeir off. “Don’t tell me you hate it,” Thadgeir said. “I’ll have to strangle you.”

“Hate it?” He stood, forgetting his aching weariness, and tossed the cloak around his shoulders. It was surprisingly light for how thick the fur had felt and seemed. “It’s fit for a king.”

“Fit for a Jarl,” Thadgeir said quietly. His look was rueful.

“Well, I’m not a Jarl anymore.” Dengeir folded it up and laid it back inside the box, smoothing down the edges. “But I’m an old man who gets cold, so I suppose that’s cause enough to wear it. It’s a fine gift, kinsman, very fine. Don’t know what you were playing at, but I’m grateful.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t accuse me of getting the money by spying for the Legion.”

His mind had just started going down that path, and he glared at Thadgeir. But Thadgeir laughed. Well, treacherous or not, false or not, there was no questioning that the cloak was beautiful. And it would be welcome on the high, cold trails when he walked to visit Felkulzii.

* * *

“What’s it like to fly?” he asked Felkulzii not long after that. They sat out on the rock under a sky the colour of cotton. There was no sun to warm the stone, iron-cold beneath him so that he knew his hip would pain badly later. It threatened snow, and Dengeir thought his walk back would be a miserable one, even bundled in his new shirred beaver cloak.

Felkulzii made a sound like a long, quiet hiss that Dengeir had come to recognize as a laugh. That was so strange to him, dreamlike strange—that he could make a dragon laugh.

“What is it like to have hands, Dengeir of Stuhn? What is it like to never step in the same river twice? What is it like to feel the pass of seasons in your skin?”

Dengeir looked at him, but Felkulzii did not make the snorting noise. He was not laughing. “Aging? Not the best, I’ll tell you that.”

Felkulzii crept a little closer. He was always very careful when he moved in Dengeir’s presence, whether it was to sigh or shift or flick his tail. His head was a massive diamond, the colour of one too, easily the size of a wheelbarrow, perched at the end of his elegant serpent’s neck.

“Tell me,” Felkulzii said. “I would know. Tiid”—Dengeir had learned this word; it meant ‘time’, and he was very proud to know that—“does not feel to you as it does to us.”

Dengeir thought about that, turning his face to the sun, though it had no warmth this late in the season and was hidden behind clouds. He thought of his sore, disobedient, collapsing body with its sudden creaks and pains, pressed into the stone below him so he was aware of each protrusion, each crease. The fear and contempt of the young and the kindly condescension of the old. He thought of his life, stretching out behind him, a trail whose end he’d nearly reached.

He could see it now, the last few leagues ahead of him, no longer a mystery but a defined, definite path. The thing coming to meet him. No surprises for him, nothing to wait for. He’d been stepping in this direction all his life, heading this way.

The thought brought a sort of tight, hard-knotted constriction to his chest. Grief.

“Can’t understand ageing if you don’t understand death,” he said to Felkulzii. “That’s what it is, see. Falling apart, inch by inch.” Falling apart and not being able to knit yourself back together. “That’s it. That’s all.”

Speaking of it, of his mortality, made it feel so much more immediate and real. He woke up and slept dreaming of it, death, yet now, sitting beside this ancient timeless beast for whom it was all unimaginable theory, it suddenly seemed that it was on him. That he could feel himself dying each second.

“I listen,” Felkulzii said. His head was so close that Dengeir might have reached out and touched him. Something he could not quite bring himself to do, no matter how friendly they were. “Continue.”

“Well,” he said, turning so that he was looking into one of Felkulzii’s black-red eyes, “that’s just about the worst part of getting old. Knowing that most of the things in my life are behind me.”

“But surely it is it not all bad,” Felkulzii said. His head and throat rumbled as he spoke. An effect of the magic, he’d told Dengeir, that allowed him speech and flight. “Living forever, never changing, only sleeping and waking… The years do not change. They are alike. _Tiid_. This is what _Tiid_ is. Movement without change.”

“That’s true. It’s our condition, as they say. Change. Must be boring otherwise.”

Felkulzii moved again, creeping closer, curling his swanlike neck. The scales on his flank rose and flattened. Even in the grey air they glittered like the points of blades.

“Perhaps that is a blessing,” Felkulzii said. “You can always be other than you are.”

 _It’s not that simple._ But maybe it was that simple. It just was not that _easy_.

Felkulzii had stopped moving, and now he lay still. He didn’t blink or breathe, gave no signs of life except for the lambent intelligent eyes that tracked Dengeir. If a blizzard came, if the snow fell, it would creep across Felkulzii, and he might sleep buried under it like the princess in the story over whom snowdrops had bloomed in such profusion. That was how her true love had found her, to wake her with his kiss.

The memory of that children’s story—one he hadn’t heard in years—and the strangeness of the comparison tickled him. It made him smile.

“You are amused,” Felkulzii observed.

“I suppose I am.” Without thinking, Dengeir reached out to stroke his head, realised what he was doing, and drew his hand back. Felkulzii was not a tame dog, to be prodded and petted. Presumption would be met with worse than a bite.

But Felkulzii made the hissing noise again. “All is well, Dengeir of Stuhn. Go on, if you wish it.”

Did he wish it? He wasn’t sure. But to be given the chance to touch a dragon’s hide, a living dragon’s hide no less, and then refuse would be the height of folly. He might as well just lie down and die for a truth. He wasn’t yet that much of a coward.

Steeling himself he reached out and brushed his fingertips along Felkulzii’s face, across the ridge over one of his eyes. _The forehead? Do dragons have foreheads?_ His skin was cool but not icy cold, and not hard metal as he’d expected. It felt—surprisingly, maybe disappointingly—like the skin of any other lizard, ridged and smooth in different places, bumpy.

“Can you feel that?” he asked.

“I can.” Felkulzii’s eye was very bright, moving quickly. “We are able to feel touch. Cold, heat, pressure. Pain. _Tiid_.”

Somehow that hadn’t occurred to him, the bit about pain. Dragons looked invincible, armoured in scale beyond any metal dreamed of in Tamriel. Stabbing one would be like stabbing a siege tower. About as smart and effective. If they could hurt, what else could they feel?

“You asked what it was like to fly,” Felkulzii said when he’d finally drawn his hand away. “Do you wish to do so?”

Dengeir looked at him, suspicious. “Everyone wants to fly.” He felt confident of that, wild generalization though it was. “Lots of folks have tried to build machines to do it. Never seems to work, though.” _Guess we’re meant to stay here, stuck on the ground._

Felkulzii made the motion where he moved his head back and forth. Dengeir thought it was a cagey, wary look, the equivalent of a human not knowing where to rest his gaze. Shy and waiting for mockery. So strange, on a creature as wholly alien and possessed of such grandeur and wisdom.

“I would give you that gift,” Felkulzii said at last, speaking more slowly. Like he was afraid of being misunderstood. “The gift of flying.”

“And I’d give you hands. Better than picking up jewels with those daggers you call teeth.”

Felkulzii moved back as if he were suddenly restless and tired of lying still. “I do not speak idly, Dengeir of Stuhn. Ni lo. Should you like to fly, I would bear you.”

Dengeir felt his mouth open on a retort, but when he went to speak he did not, he realised, know what he meant to say. Snow was falling in a strange hush all around them, so silent it filled his ears like a roaring, and the reflection of milky white sky off Felkulzii’s scales made his head pound. He had to look away.

It was a danger, and a folly, and maybe a trap. The greater part of him, the part that was cautious and watchful and never laid his foot without checking the ground, screamed at him, _Old fool, you cannot be considering this, the back of that dragon will be your deathbed._

“Should you like to,” Felkulzii repeated. “There is no small danger. I will not move sharply, but I cannot safely catch you if you fall. It has been done, but not often.”

How many mortal men had ridden on the back of a dragon? And now here was the opportunity. _Speak, idiot. Say something. Say something before you lose this one chance forever._

“You crazy?” Felkulzii blinked once, the membrane drawing across his eye like the slow blink of a lizard, and Dengeir wondered if he knew the word. Probably not. “You’re goddamned right I’d like to fly, and I don’t much care if I do fall. I reckon some things are worth falling for.”

“That may be,” Felkulzii said, very serious, “but I do not wish to shorten your time in this realm unnecessarily. You must swear to hold on. On your honour. I will not bear you if not.”

Dengeir stood, knees creaking, and crept closer. The rounded top of the rock on which they sat made it uncomfortable to pick his way over, the unevenness of the surface throwing off his balance. “I swear,” he said. “On my honour.”

Felkulzii lowered his chest until it touched the rock, folding his wings behind him and leaning down on one side. His shoulder-blade was presented for Dengeir to climb, a long, flat ridge that thickened, suddenly, into the wing.

Dengeir studied him, the line of spikes that adorned his spine. Further up, where his back met his neck, they shortened and the space between them grew longer. He thought that he could sit in that gap, if not totally comfortably then at least with some modicum of safety, and hang on to the barb before him.

So long as Felkulzii didn’t lift his neck too high and crush him, of course. So long as he didn’t slip and tumble.

“You sure about this?” He once again laid a hand on Felkulzii’s scales, and was once again struck by the snakelike texture of his skin. It felt oddly fine, as if he could have gouged it with his nails, though he knew that dragonscale far surpassed steel in its hardness and strength. “It doesn’t feel a little embarrassing to have a man riding about on your back?”

“It is not an experience to which I am accustomed. Nor do I wish to do so often.” Felkulzii made a snorting noise and rolled a bit further over—almost like, Dengeir thought, a dog that was trying to itch its chest and belly. “But you are not other men. You are a friend. Fahdon, Dengeir of Stuhn. I will grant you this thing.”

 _A friend._ He paused again but did not withdraw his hand. He wondered if dragons had friends, as Nords had friends. They had a word for it—maybe? Fahdon? Had there once been dragons with whom Felkulzii spoke, laughed his hissing laugh, flew like birds forming a vee as they crossed the autumn skies?

It did not seem to fit. It certainly didn’t match the terrifying stories of doombringers and harbingers of the end, of cunning, brutal monsters, hungry to coerce and dominate and destroy.

Well, thinking over the mystery wouldn’t help him solve it. Wouldn’t do much, in fact. He’d set his mind to this and so he’d see it through. Trying not to stumble or fall he stepped carefully on Felkulzii’s shoulder, reaching forward to grab one of the spikes.

Felkulzii moved, catching him off guard for a moment, all Dengeir’s muscles going tense. But he was simply shifting his shoulders back so that plane of his back was flat, the easier for Dengeir to climb. He could have walked upright, but that felt improper somehow, so he crept forwards, hunched over, his hands curved to catch him if he slipped.

 _That’d be the way to go. Climbing on a dragon’s back, got impaled on a spike._ You’d probably get into Sovngarde on guts alone, but gods how the ancestors would laugh.

He managed to make his way between the spines on Felkulzii’s back without severing anything important or falling and breaking a bone, and he made his way upwards, towards Felkulzii’s neck. The muscle was still powerful, humblingly so, but he could feel the way it grew finer, the tremors in it more apparent.

He slid in between two of the spines and seated himself carefully, his legs stretched out on either side. The barb was alarmingly close. _Seventy years together, and this is how the old balls will be crushed._ Was that worth it, too? Probably. He had to stop thinking of various ways in which he could be maimed.

“I’m not hurting you?” he asked Felkulzii.

“As light as a touch of wind, son of _Kaan_.” His voice echoed with amusement. “I can scarce feel you.”

“Now, I know that’s not true.” The words came out hoarse, and he sat there for a moment, struggling to catch his breath. The strangeness of his position was starting to sink in: wedged between a dragon’s scales, with a dragon between his legs. “Tekla’s been baking more lately.”

“I speak seriously. You must clutch tightly. I may not feel if you slip,” Felkulzii said. “It will be startling, I think.”

“Just go on and fly.”

Felkulzii lifted himself from the rock onto his hind legs, and Dengeir had the sensation of being lifted up, up, up, a strange, dizzying feeling that brought back images of when he’d been a boy and his papa had tossed him. He clung even harder to the spike before him, already laughing, amazed at the sensation of power below him.

“Hold on,” Felkulzii said again, and leapt.

The rush made Dengeir’s stomach drop. The ground slipped away beneath them, the trees shrinking to the size of carvings, then toys, then miniatures, his boots hanging over it all in a reminder that this was real, a thing that was happening to him, Dengeir of Stuhn. Their scuffed toes and peeling soles were odd and startling, a throwback to a life he’d forgotten.

He was flying and the world was a blur, a memory, a dream. It was a thing he had seen once that no longer had any hold on him. He had been born aloft and he would die aloft and that was the entirety of his life. The wind roared over him and clouds whirled past him, through him. He felt as if he were a cloud himself, a wisp of cloud that was pulled far across the sky.

“Is all well?” Felkulzii’s voice came back clearly, though the wind was stronger up here. He beat his wings so that they rose and fell, a sensation not unlike being on the deck of a ship. Another thing Dengeir had experienced once. _Maybe I’ll sail again when this is done. Head up to Solitude. If flying is possible, what isn’t?_ “There is nothing amiss?”

“Yes!” He hugged the spike again, but with affection, this time. “I mean, no! Just go on, my—fadan!" _Butchered that._ "Let’s fly!”

Felkulzii needed no further prompting. His muscles rippled beneath Dengeir with each beat of his wings, his power more apparent than ever, and then they were off like an escaped horse, cutting between the peaks of the Jeralls, so close that Dengeir reached out and left gouges in snow like stacked cotton fluff.

They sailed through the hills and crags of the Reach, dipping and rising with the bowls of valleys. Felkulzii—wisely, Dengeir thought—steered clear of any villages or settlements, staying in the highlands where the snow lay deep and the mountains cast black shadows, though noon was only a few hours past.

Felkulzii turned north, suddenly, the sun wheeling above them as he slid and tilted. Dengeir held the spike so hard his arms cramped, but the thrill was joyful, and he whooped for the bliss of it. He thought Felkulzii might take him north, to see the ocean, but that must have been hours away even flying.

They did another circle of the high mountain valleys, then Felkulzii brought them back over the Jeralls. For the first time Dengeir noticed the difference between them and the Druadachs: the Druadachs pale grey like the silver that veined them and turned the Reach’s history to such a bloody horror, the Jeralls redder, more rounded, with softer slopes.

They headed east, avoiding the town itself. Felkulzii’s wings, wide as a small village’s length, cast massive shadows as they flew, distorting with each buckle and warp in the ground beneath them. Their route was circuitous, and they rose and fell in long, graceful waves so that Dengeir yet again thought of sailing a vast sea. Sometimes they flew so low that the tips of the pines seemed mere feet below the soles of his boots, and other times they rose swiftly, darting upwards so that Dengeir’s back was pressed to the spike behind him.

He had never seen his hold like this before, all of it at once. And though he knew he was being nostalgic and foolish and it was not _his_ hold any longer, he still felt it, like he could cover the whole place with his hands. Hide it with a gesture and then, with the same motion, reveal it, baring it to the sun.

They dropped lower, turned a little. That was when he saw it.

It stood out in the land like the place where an ember had touched pristine white fur. Even from their height he could see how the walls and towers had buckled and fallen in, the stone broken. All of it blackened and cracked. Helgen.

His throat tightened. He thought he might throw up.

Instead he leaned forwards, holding tight to the spine so his shift did not throw him off balance. “Take me down here!” He had to yell to be heard over the wind’s scream. “Down there!”

Felkulzii banked slowly, making a long, curving loop over the spot. Either he had heard Dengeir or understood what he wanted well enough. They whirled down, and the nauseous feeling in Dengeir’s stomach intensified, his head spinning with each rotation.

When Felkulzii’s feet finally touched the ground with a rumble that shook the earth, Dengeir slid from his back, nearly boneless. Wondering if he was, truly, ready to see.

* * *

In the suddenness of their descent, it had been easy to ignore Helgen rising to meet them. But on the ground, even as he bent double, the reality swarmed him. The air he sucked in smelled of campfire and lightning and something sweet, not quite rotten, that he couldn’t bear to consider.

It would have been easier to remember nothing, to recognize nothing. But while it had been years since he’d been here, the outlines were the same: a building that stood like an upturned shipwreck, no roof, where he’d had mead with one of the elders and reminisced about easier days and kinder weather; the blasted roads that he’d once ridden through, waving at a boy who solemnly sucked his thumb; the highest watchtower in the area from which he’d surveyed his hold, fallen so neatly it was as if it had been snapped.

And the people, too. The people were still here. They’d all been here.

Dengeir walked among the fallen bodies. Unrecognizable, just charred, cracked humps, the skin split where they’d cooked from within. Occasionally he could make out the shape of an outstretched arm, a hand. He could see, then, how some of them had perished while crawling away, some while huddled in fear, sheltering in the ruins of their houses, in the shadows of their toppled walls.

To his shame, he felt tears in his eyes, scalding and painful after the brutal cold of their flight. _They were my people. They didn’t deserve to die like that._ He couldn’t even blame Siddgeir for this. Dengeir couldn’t have protected them from a dragon, either, had he been Jarl.

But why Helgen? Why here? The simplest folks in the world. Honest. They churned butter, made juniper berry mead, fretted over the market and the harvest and their taxes. And then, one day, their sky had blackened and burned and their stone walls had melted like tallow and their flesh, too. Like tallow. Why would the gods allow such atrocity?

Felkulzii, behind him, made an odd noise, almost like a whine but softer, lower-pitched. He’d never heard it before, and he turned back to look at his friend.

Amid the ruin of the town, Felkulzii’s beauty shone like a lighthouse beacon, impossible to look away from. But amid it, too, he no longer looked out of place, a creature displaced in time. He was a dragon, standing on the shattered remains of the land and lives a dragon had destroyed, untouched and unmoved by the carnage.

The sight and the thought choked him. He had to turn away. 

He still felt Felkulzii behind him, shifting restlessly, his scales whispering as he moved. A streak of white slashed his vision, and he turned his head. Felkulzii’s tail, lashing the air restlessly.

His tears shamed him. He wiped at his face.

To his surprise and momentary fear, Felkulzii lowered his head and nudged him. The gentle gesture nearly knocked him off his feet. It took him only a half-moment longer to realize it was kindness. Compassion.

Felkulzii didn’t lift his head, and when he spoke again, his words confirmed Dengeir’s guess. “Forgive me, Dengeir of Stuhn.”

“Don’t.” He scrubbed his fur cloak across his face again, and, content that he would show no more weakness, let it fall. “Don’t go apologizing for things you didn’t do. I hate that.”

“We should not have come here. You are distressed.”

“Of course I’m distressed!” He barked it, and then wished he hadn’t. It wasn’t Felkulzii’s fault. But he wondered, in a part of himself that he was afraid to look at, if Felkulzii had ever done something similar, if he had once fallen from above upon screaming, cowering people, death from the sky, cooking them alive with his magical, wonderful, devouring breath. “I needed to see this with my own eyes. It was my duty to see it.”

He had to force himself to breathe because he could scarcely get the air into his lungs. But when he did it was no better, because he could still taste Helgen. Not just death—he’d seen and smelled death before—but this particular death. Death by fire, a screaming, blazing, agonizing, inescapable death.

“Let’s… let’s just get out of here.” He lay a hand on Felkulzii’s head, steadying himself with the feel of cold, smooth skin. “Now.”

* * *

They set down again further south, in a forest so dense Felkzulii crashed through the canopy as he landed, snapping branches and making the trees creak and groan with the bulk of his body.

It was better being away from Helgen. The images of it were still with Dengeir, playing behind his eyes like lights from a migraine, but finally, he could breathe again and taste nothing more than ice layered with pine and cold wind. Respite, at least temporarily, from the things he had seen, and which he knew would follow him forever.

As he’d walked among the bodies, forcing himself to look, a question had taken shape in his mind, rising through the murk of misery and grief and horror, so much horror he had felt himself growing numb. He turned it over now, trying to get its measure, assessing and measuring. Wondering if it were wise to approach the issue or if he were inviting heartbreak and disaster upon himself.

When he’d once again climbed down from Felkulzii’s back, his boots sinking into deep snow that lay untouched but in strange patterns where it had fallen through the branches above them, and he’d regained his feet, he turned to Felkulzii behind him. The dragon was still, even his scales not moving, and his head hung low to the ground.

“You aren’t like that,” Dengeir said. He didn’t specify what he meant, but he thought he didn’t have to—Helgen could not be anything but at the forefront of Felkulzii’s thoughts, too.

Felkulzii’s breath streamed from his nostrils, twin exclamation points. He didn’t respond, and still did not move.

Dengeir propped his shoulder against a tree behind him, signalling that he was settling in for an argument, that he was not going to be backing down. “Why might that be?”

Felkulzii’s head lowered further, bowed as if in sorrow. He exhaled again, made the strange whine. At length he said, “I am otherwise only because the Old One has freed me.”

“The old one?” It sounded like a riddle. Dengeir had never been much good at those. “Is that a person?”

“A dragon. Paarthurnax, ancient and wise, learned of another way and shared it with us. His brothers. Thus was I… freed.”

Felkulzii crept closer, bracing himself on the joints of his wings, a strange crawling motion that was curiously inelegant. It made him look more monstrous, somehow, but also more like any other living thing in the matter and dirt of the world. “It is never a given thing, Dengeir of Stuhn. Never something I can take for granted. Every day I must struggle with myself, defeat myself, my lower nature.”

“Even with me?”

The film closed over Felkulzii’s eyes and opened again. “With you most of all, fahdon.”

So he had been in danger all the while, a moment of weakness away from being bitten in two or incinerated—or, maybe, dropped from a very great height. He should have been terrified, horrified by his scrape with death however unwitting, but instead he felt an odd inkling of sympathy. _Struggling with yourself. Don’t we all?_

“I know what that’s like,” he said. “Sometimes… well, sometimes I’m not much better than a dragon myself, if the truth’s to be told.”

“ _No_ , Dengeir of Stuhn. You do not know. Your nature is not like mine.” He shifted a bit, lifting his head from side to side. “But I thank you. The sentiment is a kind one. You are a kind man. A good man.”

“Not particularly.”

“I am _dovah_. Do not insult me. I do not spend my breath idly. Words are sacred.”

The hour was drawing on, he could see it now, in the way the light had changed, how it fell, suddenly golden, through the gaps in the branches above them. The clouds were lighter here than in the east, and they scudded quickly across the sky. The wind must have been brutal, but he hadn’t sensed it as they flew. He’d been aware only of their immense speed, his weightlessness.

That memory would come, now, with the memory of Helgen. That beauty and bliss, that horror and savagery bound together. One and the same. Just like a dragon.

Neither of them spoke for a while. Dengeir figured that was all the answer he was going to get. It didn’t make much sense to him, but then, Felkulzii was right. He was a man, nothing more, and he didn’t understand. “Guess I should be concerned about how hard you find it, to not go killing and slaying,” he said. “But I don’t, really. I’m glad you’re different. You’ve been a friend, too.”

In the creeping sunset the light kept coming, and his shadow, when he looked behind him, was long and black. The air was very still, though up among the highest twig-like branches the trees rustled and shifted and stirred. Dengeir looked up, watching them, remembering the trees he and Thadgeir and Orna had climbed as youngsters. Thinking that he had flown so much higher than that. Thinking that he would give anything to have Orna back.

Felkulzii’s scales shifted, a sound like rain on glass. “Your… kindness, your friendship, have been among the finest experiences of my existence.” He dropped his beautiful, monstrous head. “Had you lived many many years beyond memory ago, first and favourite of my priests would you be.”

“Is that a compliment?” Dengeir asked. His heart was pounding in his chest.

“It is neither compliment nor insult.” Felkulzii’s voice creaked and grated. “It is my great weakness. The Old One has said, ‘It is better to deny a hunger than to feed it.’ His wisdom humbles me. It is the truth. I have fed my hunger to pass time with a mortal. It was not wise.”

Dengeir felt that he should apologize, but he did not know what for, or how. He knew a farewell when he heard one.“Didn’t mean to make it harder for you. That wasn’t very friendly of me. You should have said.”

“It is my duty, not yours.” Felkulzii gave a sound that sounded curiously human. Almost like a sigh. “I did not want to harm or enslave mortal-kind, but nor did I feel much interest in you. That has changed. I would like to know more humans. To pass more time with all of them. Especially you.”

“Doesn’t seem like a crime.” Felkulzii looked at him blankly, and he wondered if dragons had the notion of crime, the idea of rule of law. Presumably they had standards, moral norms, alien as they may have been. “Doesn’t seem bad, I mean.”

“It is bad. _Dov_ cannot fly so incautiously among men. Our desire to hurt, to crush, to dominate is too strong. Given time I would harm you, too.”

Dengeir was going to say that he didn’t believe this. His own response surprised him. It wasn’t like him to be so unconcerned about his safety. But something about the fairytale strangeness of their time together made him feel powerful, strong, mighty. Like he was a real hero, able to face things. If a dragon could speak to him, if he could fly, then he could be brave.

“I will return to my barrow and sleep for a while,” Felkulzii said. “The snow is very deep on the mountainside. _Los ahtiid,_ my friend. I am most tired.”

“Will we meet again?” His throat closed around the words. He knew the answer before he even asked the question.

“No,” Felkulzii said. His tail cut the air again, a sharp, brutal lash that could doubtless have crushed a house. “There is no place for me in this world. It seems I, too, cannot step in the same river twice.”

 _Don’t say that. Don’t go._ Felkulzii had been his only friend these past months—the first true friend he had had in a long while. He hadn’t had to worry that a dragon might carry his words back to Siddgeir, or worse, to Tullius, hadn’t felt like he needed to look back over his shoulder for fear that something was creeping up unseen. A madness, perhaps, because a dragon could just as easily strike him down from the front. But that would have been a relief, in a way. He was tired of being afraid. He was tired of being weak and small.

“I don’t much know what this life will be like,” Dengeir said at last, “without you in it. Maybe it’s sad to say, but you’ve taken up a lot of my time lately. Lot of my thoughts, too.” _You’re important to me,_ is what he was saying. But that felt too sappy to express, too small and foolish. Too much like something else. “I’ll miss you, Felkulzii.”

It was the first time had had said Felkulzii’s name, he realized.

“And I, you.” Felkulzii moved closer, nudged him with his head again, as he had in Helgen. The lightest touch, almost a caress. “I feel the breath of life in you still, Dengeir of Stuhn. Your spirit shall walk bravely through the gates of the Beyond.”

“But we won’t meet there.”

“Who but Akatosh knows?” There was warm amusement in his voice, now. “Given the weight of eternity, perhaps even the souls of the _dov_ may pass away.” He nudged Dengeir with his head once more, his scales whispering on Dengeir’s skin. “As long as my spirit lives on, you will not be forgotten. This I swear.”

“Thank you.” He lay his hand once more on Felkulzii’s skin, stroking his head. “I won’t forget you either. Nine gods. I don’t think anyone could. I think in all the ages of time, in Tsun’s hall, I’ll know your name.”

Felkulzii was blinking at him, not moving away, and he felt so wrung out, so raw, that he lowered his head, pressing his temple and cheek into the skin over Felkulzii’s snout. It was smooth and cool, but underneath it he could feel the little movements of Fekulzii’s muscles. The reminder that, whatever form of life he was, he too was alive.

They stayed like that for a little while until Dengeir got too cold and shivered, making himself pull away. He tugged the beaver cloak more tightly around him. “Not going to make me walk back, I hope. It’s a long journey for an old man.”

“No, indeed not. I will bear you there.”

 _One last flight_. The thought made him sad.

But when he’d once again climbed up Felkulzii’s back, once again settled himself between the great ridged spikes, and Felkulzii bounded up from the forest floor in a leap like a massive stag’s, Dengeir’s stomach flipped and nothing existed but the two of them, the wind, the instant. The ground slid away beneath them, and so, too, did his fear, his bitterness, his sadness.

In the moment he was flying. He was flying and there was no other time to consider but the now, immediate and boundless and a gift. Always present, and always a gift.

**Author's Note:**

> Everyone says Dengeir is paranoid, but he’s right a little bit. He’s also one of the few Jarls who acknowledges that it’s his first job to protect his people. I love that about him. Not to be dramatic but I would die for Jarl Dengeir. He is, however, Too Mean to Tekla, and then turns around and makes her his steward. I assume he realizes at some point he’s being a big ass and just gets over it.
> 
> I'm on [Reddit](https://www.reddit.com/user/thinmancaviar/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/wanda_pourtales) so hit me with that sweet follow energy!


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